Washington D.C. – Al Monitor, July 01, 2025
France-Algeria relations have deteriorated recently, marked by expulsions of diplomats and tensions over Moroccan control of Western Sahara, migration and more.
France’s prime minister called on Algeria to pardon an imprisoned dissident writer on Tuesday after an Algerian court upheld his five-year prison sentence.
What happened: On Tuesday, an Algerian court upheld the five-year prison sentence for writer Boualem Sansal, a dual French-Algerian citizen jailed in Algeria since November. Sansal was sentenced in March for undermining national unity after he told the right-wing French news outlet Frontieres that France had unjustly transferred Moroccan territory to Algeria during the French colonial era in North Africa. Sansal was arrested last November, according to Agence France-Presse.
French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou told reporters on Tuesday that Algeria should grant clemency to Sansal. “The situation Boualem Sansal is being subjected to is one that all French people and the French government find intolerable,” he said, according to Le Monde. “Now that the sentence has been handed down, we can imagine pardon measures, particularly in view of our compatriot’s health, will be taken.”
Sansal, 75, is currently suffering from prostate cancer, according to The Associated Press. A novelist who writes in French, he is an outspoken critic of both Algeria’s secular government and Islamists in the country. In a 2009 interview with the German news outlet Qantara, he said he believes there are “parallels” between Islamism and Nazism.
French President Emmanuel Macron attended Sansal’s naturalization ceremony last year.
